The Markos Factor

I ran into the Great Orange Satan himself (pictured) yesterday in the early evening, and he was at pains to point out that the YearlyKos Convention has only a loose association with the DailyKos blog (YearlyKos Executive Director Gina Cooper is also a DailyKos fellos) and nothing in particular to do with Markos himself.

Indeed, it's not even totally clear to me that's there's an especially logical or organic connection to bloggers and blogging in play here. Obviously, that's the causal origin of the gathering. But bloggers are interested in the issues, and an awful lot of what's going on here is just around issues -- foreign policy, telecom policy, education, church/state issues, whatever -- issues that activists care about whether on- or off-line. It seems to me that this confab is probably going to evolve over time in a more generic direction and be something like an inverse CPAC rather than something closely linked with a particular subculture.

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